@terdon-stopharmingMonica And even if it does... people say there's not enough volunteers to do the work, to keep some bigger sites clean. There's a lot of posts on how these volunteers would like their tools improved, for example. But I can't think of one within 10 seconds that asks for a feature to e.g. get better question quality on SO from a 1-rep user with a question point of view.

It's an interest problem. SE inc simply don't care much about the public Q&A. On the other hand, we care exclusively about the public Q&A. So the company is stuck with these loud, annoying users who keep focusing on the part of their product line that makes the least money for them.

a curator has investment in the site and can be brought on board to affect change. A 1 rep question asker is statistically likely to never engage with the site again, to never use a vote or any systems, and to never care one iota beyond getting their answer. You have no leverage over unengaged question askers, but you do over curators

I know a whole bunch of excellent software devs who you could never, not in a trillion years and not with any tooling or community in the world convince to start answering questions and curating. they have simply no interest

So sure, a few years ago, the public side was essential but since SE seem to think that part's mission accomplished I really don't think they care much about the public Q&A anymore. And, well, look at them! Do their actions make you feel like they do care?

@Magisch And some people stick around after their first post is a good one, it encourages them. I don't know if I'd be where I am now if my first post would've been crap and no-one helped me fixed the parts that were fixable...

@Tinkeringbell My first question was closed as a duplicate to a question that was asking a different question but the answer touched upon that question. I was annoyed about that for about.... five years?

most of the unwelcomingness that developed is a symptom of there not being enough people to do the curation, so the ones left have to be efficient with their time: they use interaction-agnostic feedback like downvotes, they use curt, even canned comments.

@Mithical That's something I hadn't considered before but seems obvious in retrospect: the experience of a new user will be completely different depending on whether the user is coming in as an asker or an answerer.

Above PM2Ring gave a link to Jeff's blog, after reading that article I went to check what is new - apparently he's going all electric. The subject of his latest article was that the cost of batteries (the major cost of electric vehicles, especially scooters) had dropped by half in a few years. That led to a video about his latest purchase, a 30 kmh scooter that they're happy with. Thing is, the newest scooters go 3x as fast - so fast that they can spin their tires when you're already

My first experience with SE was on Super User where I started by answering, not asking. And someone came in and made constructive edits (fixing capitalizations, minor corrections) and I was hooked immediately. The fact that i) the site allowed such edits and ii) some helpful person took the time to fix my post made me love the site.

And that's why I think it's not so bad to not just ask meta for input, but also the people that ask their first question and aren't 'engaged' like some people put it... because they might have ideas on what a good fence holding them back may look like too!

I don't speak any languages that are written right-to-left, is it hard to switch from one to the other when switching between Hebrew and English? Or is it completely natural by now? I mean, is it any harder to switch direction when reading/writing than it is to switch between languages when speaking?

@ShadowThePrincessWizard No, I mean in your head. I'm not asking @Mithical since I know they're not a native Hebrew speaker, but you are (I think) so I'm wondering if you find it is more of a cognitive effort to switch between reading English and Hebrew (where you need to switch direction) than it is to switch between speaking them.

Nope. I've been reading the text for nearly as long as I've been reading English, so that's not the problem, but my vocabulary only started getting a boost when I moved here... although not quite as much as it should have gotten.

@terdon-stopharmingMonica Do you easily get confused by 'weirdly formatted' signs? There's been memes about those, while I do find them funny, my brain is usually pretty good about picking out the right 'order' of words... I don't really know if it's comparable to reading directions for languages, but it sort of sounds that way?

@Mithical IIRC, there was a psychology experiment in which they had the subjects glasses (goggles) that inverted everything. People adjusted surprisingly quickly (days, a week or to?). And found it confusing and different when they took the glasses off.

@Tinkeringbell Not at all. But I was raised bilingual which also apparently helps. I'm a native speaker of Greek and English which have different alphabets, for example, and I have no trouble at all switching between those. It's only the direction that I've never tried changing and that seems like a more basic aspect of language since it changes what comes "first" and "next".

And this is broader than language too, it affects the way we look at things in general. We (you and I, for example) tend to look at anything in a left-to-right, then top-to-bottom direction while someone from Japan will likely look top-to-bottom first and an Arabic or Hebrew speaker will go right-to-left. It's really interesting how many aspects of our interaction with the world language affects.

@Rob England nearly managed to kill me... you usually look left, right, left here when crossing a 'double' street with traffic from both ways. In England, it's the other way round. I remembered though :P

@Tinkeringbell I live in the UK. Now, both are equally natural which means I freak out when crossing a road anywhere. I never know where to look!

@JAD and they've done it reasonably: just "look right". They did the same thing in Barcelona but it was three or four lines of text. The first time I saw it, I was in the middle of the street, looking back by the time I got to the end. So it actually put me at risk instead of protecting me!

@Mithical explain exactly how they are prioritizing building the best Q&A platform they can, and not earn the most money as quick as possible, with specific examples, which sounds impossible at this point, unfortunately. See, I'm not even talking about PR stuff like apologies, defamatory statement retraction, legal misstep fixes, it already doesn't seem possible without any of that. But it's okay, I guess, there was a reason SE was created, then there will be a reason another site will be created

@Magisch just fyi, this is exactly what's been up for a loong time

one of the things I'd like em to do is put their usual "priorities" on pause for 2-3 months and just do what the most upvoted bug reports or feature requests have been asking for for years

I think it would be one of the best things they could do to make it look like they're finally listening to the community's wants

just go down the list, and talk with us about why something can't be done, so we can explore it further and think of a better solution to some UX problem

when was the last time they've done that for significant features, not just cosmetic/technical fixes like missing apostrophes and unclosed braces

That part is interesting, but... what would you think about turning it around a bit? Meta shouldn't really 'set' the priority list for a product, unless it's serious bugs that really break the site.

So, how about 'this is our roadmap and the things we're working on, we'd like specific feedback focused on this, bugs that turn up while we roll things out, things we can take into account when building something'? A bit like when they decided to redo HNQ and posted a question asking for input on that specific bit of functionality?

There's a load of feature requests out there, but they're also... all over the place. I don't know about SE, but the software I'm working on sees the most progress if we just iterate over specific functionality each time.

And ask our users what they'd like to see improved on that specific part, or pick up their requests when we actually get to it (and our users understand that that's the case, that they don't really set the priorities).

@Magisch I'm not sure we should have influence on the contents of the actual roadmap, just perhaps on the 'how' of the stuff that's being worked on. And I kinda got the impression the 'The Loop' series was a bit like that too...

@Magisch Perhaps, but then we're back at that blogpost that was shared this morning, about not letting meta decide what you work on... Because it's either just technically not feasible, or asking for a truck instead of a car.

I just don't like that the posts which have definitely attracted enough votes to consider them something the community wants management/dev feedback on get ignored, nevermind if they're useful or not, just answer them to that effect then, but answer, don't ignore

which is why I say go down the list of highest voted and post ANYTHING

@Tinkeringbell The brass tax this comes down to is that the users need to have more influence on the dev cycle then the devs

just like when I build functionality for work I have some unalienable constraints but I would be monumentally stupid to try and decide what the users should like, and usability testing and feedback is essential to build a working product

@Magisch Sure. but still, my management decided where the budget goes: Improving data input, improving error handling, refactoring, UI... We can listen to users on all those points (okay, except refactoring, perhaps)... but unless there's a bug that prevents users from using the application at all, it's the job of management to make decisions about priorities, and keep in mind not only users but also business and other constraints (here, that sometimes means laws or regulations on input formats)

what I'm proposing is a way to make the community feel no longer ignored, even if the suggestions are not acted upon, they will still be addressed and seen as recognized by staff, which is good enough in my experience for that purpose

a notch up from that would be if on the suggestions they'd say they just won't do as posted, they'd ask "can you think of a better way to do that?" to allow users to improve those requests in hopes of maybe actually getting things changed for the better in a different way

@user1306322 Okay... but if they'd ask that right now, I'd think they're working on it, or have plans of working on it... what if they're not? You're only creating more 'feedback' that isn't getting any 'visible' results

but this is just like customer support 101 stuff - "thank you for your feedback, do you have any suggestions on how we may improve?" or "unfortunately we can't help you with this issue, is there anything else (or any other way) we can help you with?" - they don't ask that frequently enough imo

@Magisch Actually, getting a more concrete message that MSE is still valued but also explains how it could do better (like giving focused feedback, and using it to ask for that)... doesn't sound too bad to me.

@user1306322 Active reading is a way of reading, where you actually interact with the content :P So he's just making edits while reading stuff, so it sticks better, if I understand correctly ;)

> Try these techniques to make your reading active

Underline or highlight key words and phrases as you read. When you return to it later on, you can easily see which points you identified as important. Be selective - too much highlighting won't help. Make annotations in the margin to summarise points, raise questions, challenge what you've read, jot down examples and so on. You can do this in printed books or etexts. This takes more thought than highlighting, so you'll probably remember the content better. (Use sticky notes if you don't want to mark the text.)

@Magisch I don't think that's true, I think the majority is actually on the better side of both progress and political correctness, and not in a limited US-centric way that the staff seems to be, but yea they're not going to risk giving up the control in this way, so it's only a theory we can entertain, at least on this site

honestly if they just read all the proposed solutions, even the bad ones, the signal to noise ratio is so high they could just pick random items from top 5 and get better results than what they're doing on their own

Yes! the 11th annual Stack Overflow Gives Back is underway and we will be making the same charitable donations as in as previous years. There were some scheduling conflicts early on so I'm getting started a bit later than usual, but the emails inviting Moderators to make their charity selections ...

Despite the fact that votes mean something different on meta, or at least can mean something different on meta, the mouse over text when hovering over the up/down vote buttons on meta sites is the same as in the main sites:
We all know we get an inordinate amount ...

it needs to be immediately obvious that these votes are not the same votes as on main sites, without ANY user interaction, just from a printed out screenshot on a black and white sheet of paper

I'm not a UXician but I know that much

absolute mad lad proposition: what if we displayed a plaque to all "new contributors" which appeared when their post on meta gets negative score which says "Don't be discouraged about downvotes! Unlike the main site, votes on Meta can mean <…>"

Yeah , , honestly I'm a little tired of saying "Uhhh oooon Meta, downvotes are different. Yadayadayada be happy dont be sad." It should be obnoxious too. Like once you open your post a huge javascript-screen blinks saying "here... downvotes are different. downvotes are better." — AdelMar 27 '14 at 19:58

it's all been said and done before, I can just open up a random post and all my thoughts are already there

Since voting on meta sites mean something different on the main sites, can you change the tooltip as well:
This question is useful and clear --> I agree
This question is unclear or not useful --> I disagree
This answer is useful --> I agree
This answer is not useful --> I disagree
...or somet...

@terdon-stopharmingMonica basically what animuson is saying in his answer is that users should post full comments explaining why they downvote, providing useful and actionable information on how to improve the content. So we should be instead talking about how we can make it easy for users to do so. We are not, however. I'd like to start that conversation, though.